Reluctant Dead: A Quin and Morgan Mystery

By John Moss

Murder casts a long shadow, reaching from fabled Easter Island in the South Pacific to the desolate shores of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Detective Miranda Quin of the Toronto Police Service takes time off to write a mystery in the tropics and gets trapped in a sinister plot with global implications. Her partner in homicide, David Morgan, is left alone to resolve the case of a beautiful corpse on a Toronto Island yacht and ends up precariously compromised in the mysterious North.

Their stories converge when they both return to Toronto. They discover themselves trapped in a labyrinth of deadly complexity, and the only way out is together. Much more than their own survival depends on it. Islands, they learn, are an illusion. Everything connects, especially when murder is involved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: May 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781459702141

Book preview

1

Crimes of the Early Morning

Miranda Quin wondered how many of her fellow passengers on the Boeing 747 were contemplating murder. Before the shuddering rush of takeoff had fully subsided, she noticed that people around her had cracked open mystery novels that would mostly begin with gushing blood or gruesome dismemberment. A few sat with eyes closed, strained at the corners, perhaps thinking of adversaries they might prefer dead. One or two, possibly, thought about victims they had safely interred in secret places.

* * *

David Morgan, outside the parking garage at Pearson International, scanned the overcast sky, wondering which sound reverberating through the fog signified his partner’s escape. He was sympathetic to her need to get away, but he was puzzled, amused, and a little concerned that she was going off to the South Pacific to try her hand at writing a mystery. At least she was travelling business class. She had been saving Aeroplan points for years, waiting for the appropriate occasion. As he wheeled out onto the throughway, Morgan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. After more than a decade working homicide together, having faced death in so many ways, they were closer than lovers. He would miss her.

He swerved to avoid a truck. When Miranda was around, she did the driving. Either an unmarked police car or her 1959 Jaguar XK 150. Morgan was a bad driver, too easily distracted. A sixteen-wheeler pressed him to speed up. He accelerated, moved into the slower lane, and slowed to a comfortable speed. She had taken a night course on crafting the mystery novel at Sir Adam Beck College. Mostly, she skipped classes because they were immersed in actual murders. He tried to focus. She had trusted that he would get her car back to the parking garage and avoid it until her return.

* * *

As the plane slipped above the fog into dazzling blue, the cabin flooded with evening light. Miranda loosened her seat belt, leaned forward, and gazed out the window for a while at the illusion of a receding horizon, then drew down her shade, and, closing her eyes, drifted into an uneasy sleep.

She woke up with a start when the hush was shattered by a voice instructing passengers on how to conduct themselves should the plane crash on water. In three languages. She imagined that by now Morgan had tucked her away in the back of his mind and was intent on other things. She felt a moment of panic. He was always there, for ten years he had been the defining witness to her life.

A year ago Morgan had gone to Easter Island for a holiday and he had come back filled with unbridled enthusiasm. His rambling narrative about the authenticity of his own experiences in the most isolated and exoticized destination in the world translated in her mind into a haven of dreams, where the tropical sun warmed ragged grasslands and towering palms, where the salt-water breeze cooled the dreamer in the verandah’s shade while local people lived ordinary lives amidst the thronging of their ancestral past. Shadows of the giant moai loomed over everything on her imagined island, making her daydreams tantalizing and dangerous.

She planned to stay for three months. The isolation would give her perspective and she would write mysteries with a Toronto setting because that was the locale she knew best. She had never been anywhere so remote from the centre of her world, thousands of kilometres from its nearest neighbours. She would be able to look back and envision Canada as a whole; she would be able to see around the edges, she would understand for the first time where she came from. And, of course, she would write about murder.

After she had started talking about her plans to colleagues and friends, by a curious form of cultural osmosis the news of her adventure reached a publisher who offered an advance payment for her novel large enough to cover a good part of her expenses. Taggart and Foulds were based in New York with a branch in Toronto. Morgan had thought it was unusual to invest so much in a new writer, a Canadian at that, but she took their offer in stride. It wasn’t that much, really, relative to her investment of time. A few thousand dollars and an upgrade to business class. A little embarrassed by her good fortune, she had told Morgan she had upgraded with Aeroplan points.

Miranda raised her window shade and was staring down into the darkness that seemed to be rising from below when a steward leaned over and said something to her that seemed exotic, but was unintelligible. She was flattered. The first leg of her journey was to São Paulo and she had obviously been taken for a cosmopolitan Brazilian returning home. That pleased her. She did not want to appear as if she were from Toronto. She knew this was a trait shared with many of her countrymen, who were vaguely embarrassed to be recognized as Canadians abroad, although if pressed they were righteously proud.

She smiled and nodded in the affirmative.

You just agreed to exchange your window seat for an aisle seat with that unhappy fellow several rows back, said the man beside her in perfect English.

Did I? she said. Of course I did.

I hope it wasn’t on my account, he said and smiled with an insouciant Errol Flynn/Johnny Depp radiance.

No. My Spanish is a little rusty, I thought she was asking me if I wanted a blanket.

She was speaking Portuguese.

My Portuguese is also rusty, said Miranda, rising to her feet and gathering her travelling paraphernalia, which consisted of a horseshoe-shaped inflatable pillow, a large handbag, a notebook, a P.D. James mystery novel, a book called Inventing Easter Island by Beverley Haun, a book by Thor Heyerdahl, and a small sheaf of vintage comics that Morgan had presented to her at the airport, the top one featuring Scrooge McDuck on Easter Island.

Excuse me, she said. It’s not personal. I prefer the aisle. The negative ions are highest if you’re close to the window.

Exactly, he said. That’s why I didn’t offer to trade places.

She disliked him immensely. He was far too comfortable being outrageously handsome, too casual with his wit, too indifferent as to whether she liked him or not.

Edging around the elderly gentleman who was displacing her, she leaned down and whispered to her erstwhile seatmate with all the condescension she could muster: You speak very good English.

Thank you. He smiled and his teeth glistened. Sloane Square, Jesus College Oxford, Washington, my life in six words, five if you don’t count Square. English comes rather naturally.

Final disposition?

Of my mortal remains? At present, unknown. Have a safe flight.

You, too, she said, puzzled, since they were on the same plane.

Later, when Miranda walked forward to the washroom, she noticed he was the only one awake in the entire business-class section, reading by the focused light beaming down from overhead. She slipped past in the gloom, apparently unnoticed. For some reason the notion that he would know where she had been made her feel exposed and vaguely improper.

He, of course, looked up upon her return and smiled directly at her as she tried to pass by in the semi-darkness.

Couldn’t sleep, she said, mouthing the words to indicate she did not wish to wake the other passengers. Suggesting she had merely been for a brief stroll.

Nor me, he mouthed in return and nodded in the direction of his book.

She smiled in the affirmative, as if there were something conspiratorial about them both reading in their isolated cones of light. Then, as she was about to move on, she realized he was reading the same book as she was; it was open at a photograph of the author confronting a giant stone head on Easter Island.

She paused, then knelt down in the aisle at the elbow of the insufferably good-looking Englishman. Since he had admitted to being posted in Washington, he must be a diplomat. He was too attractive to be a spy. She wondered if London had spies in Washington? Most likely they did. It was more important to keep up with the covert activities of your friends than your enemies.

You’re reading Thor Heyerdahl, she whispered. "Aku-Aku."

Yes, he whispered back. I am.

Nothing evasive about that, she thought. Probably a spy.

We are defined by our enemies, he said.

I beg your pardon! She was alarmed that he had been inside her head.

I thought you were trying to read the note —

No.

"In my book, there, it says, ‘We are defined by our enemies.’"

Heyerdahl said that?

No. This is an American first edition, Rand McNally, 1958, it was inscribed by a previous owner. It sounds very Oscar Wilde.

Someone else might have said, used book, she thought. Someone else might have forgone the allusion to Wilde so early in a relationship.

The scribbling of a bibliophobe — someone who dislikes books, he clarified, with the relaxed authority of a person used to explaining his own vocabulary.

It looks quite deliberate, she said, suppressing her annoyance as she leaned over to get a better look at the angular script, then, aware of the awkward intimacy of her posture, she edged away.

It doesn’t seem to bear any relationship to the text, he said, smiling at her self-consciousness. You recognized the book?

I’m reading it, too, she said.

What an uncanny coincidence.

I write in all my books, she said. There’s nothing wrong with writing in books if you own them. It’s a sign of engagement, the bibliophile’s prerogative.

She winced at her own words. She sounded like Morgan. She stood up abruptly, smiled coldly, and walked back to her seat, where she picked up her own copy of Aku-Aku, which was a later printing of the same Rand McNally edition belonging to the Englishman. Morgan had given it to her, passing it on from Alex Rufalo, their boss, who received it from an acquaintance of his wife. When she turned it over she realized it had been splayed open at the same page as his, but there was, of course, no note in the margin. Coincidences do happen, she thought. She stared at the photograph of the Norwegian adventurer and the enigmatic stone face of the moai that appeared to be gazing right through him, despite the empty eyes. Leaving the book open on her flight table, she leaned back and let her mind wander.

When she woke up the plane was circling São Paulo. She vaguely remembered dismissing the steward when she had been offered breakfast, even though she knew it was sure to be excellent fare. She was travelling business class for the comfort, not the food, and preferred to sleep through. She had a six hour layover in São Paulo and would eat in the lounge at the airport.

She looked ahead to see if her companion of the dark hours had read through the night but his seat was empty.

The seatbelt signs were on. The plane banked in rapid descent. He must have moved to a window seat for the landing. Thinking about him was unsettling and she censured herself for the sensations that were coalescing at the edge of her mind. Miranda knew she was an attractive woman, but this guy wasn’t travelling on points. He was the kind of man who hung out on the pages of Vanity Fair and romanced women a dozen years younger than herself who had record contracts, runway experience, or doctorates in psychology.

* * *

Morgan woke early, gradually, and the layers of sleep peeled away until he found himself staring at the framed poster from Rapa Nui, as Easter Island is called by the people who live there. The tinted line drawings of moai caught the morning light that drifted up through the open blinds on the lower level of his two-storey front window. The upper blinds had been jammed shut from the day he moved in, casting his sleeping loft in welcome gloom.

The telephone jangled, snapping him out of his morose reverie about monuments and mortality and the absence of Miranda. He missed her, it felt like being in the house of a dead relative after the funeral.

Morgan?

Yeah. Alex?

Since Alex Rufalo had become superintendent, Morgan usually addressed him by his title. It was early.

I’ve got a murder for you, something you can handle on your own.

Morgan said nothing.

Over on Toronto Island, Rufalo continued.

You know who it is?

Yeah. He did not elaborate.

You know who did it?

No.

So, I go to the islands and look for a dead woman. From the tone of Rufalo’s voice, Morgan somehow knew the victim was a woman.

She was found on her husband’s yacht, a forty-two-foot sloop, wood hull, a classic, Lion Class, moored at the Royal Toronto Yacht Club. I’d start with him, he called it in.

You a sailor? He was surprised by the superintendent’s ease with nautical terminology.

"No, I like boats. You’d better get going. Look for the Pemberly."

Rufalo described it as the man’s yacht. The wife must be younger. Rufalo was curiously evasive. Morgan decided not to ask for clarification.

He hung up. The best bet would be to call a cab, but instead, after he washed up and got dressed, he walked over to University Avenue and took the subway to Union Station, then walked down to what was officially known as Harbourfront. There was a police boat waiting, but he decided on the club ferry.

I’m sorry, sir, but you must be properly attired, said a boat attendant dressed in grey flannels and a blue blazer.

It’s seven-thirty, said Morgan. In the morning, he added with emphasis. What do you expect, pajamas?

Jacket and tie, sir.

Morgan looked at the young man shrewdly, waiting for him to smile. When he realized the humourlessness of the situation, he flashed his police identity card and the young man backed off. Morgan regretted not carrying his Glock. There was nothing like a gun to test the esoteric traditions of the pampered class.

From halfway across the harbour he could see the top of the Gibraltar Point lighthouse through a cleft in the trees, poised on the southernmost side of the big island. He had never been there. As a kid growing up among the tenements of Cabbagetown, he thought of Toronto Island, the islands, as distant outposts, like Florida in winter or Muskoka in summer. Places other people visited.

He found the Lion easily enough, moored bow-out in an open slip within hailing distance of the clubhouse, which hovered like a stately ghoul behind a sweeping facade of columns and verandahs. The name Pemberly was embossed across the transom in block letters, black with gold edges. And, of course, the woman’s body exposed to the morning air, propped up in the open cockpit, left him in no doubt that he was in the right place. Curiously, the few people moving about — a couple of groundskeepers, staff from the clubhouse preparing for breakfast, several deckhands of indeterminate age and gender — were completely ignoring the murder scene, although the unnatural stillness of the woman proclaimed she was dead to even the most casual observer.

Perhaps it is a matter of maintaining decorum, he thought, gazing across the manicured lawn at the Toronto skyline in the distance. How close to the city, and how very far. Another world, other times, crystallized in an institution as oppressively charming as a gangland funeral.

The body was not quite warm, but that may have been because she was dressed only in a bikini, and the air was cool, even for August. Raven hair, golden skin, lithe physique. If a corpse could be described as elegant, this was an elegant corpse.

There were no marks. As a courtesy, Morgan pressed his fingers to her jugular to confirm that she was dead. Then he turned to the man with the clipped grey moustache and jaunty cravat who was sitting across the cockpit, scrutinizing his every move as if committing Morgan’s actions to memory for future reference. He must be a lawyer, Morgan thought.

Morgan looked around, expecting to see a forensics team and medics or someone from the coroner’s office. There were only the two of them, three, if you counted the dead woman.

You called Rufalo, yourself, Morgan observed.

Yes. My name is D’Arcy. Harrington D’Arcy.

Well, Mr. D’Arcy, said Morgan. Given the name of the boat, he almost expected the corpse to be Elizabeth Bennett. Your friend seems quite dead. Sometimes using the wrong word to describe a relationship revealed the unexpected.

She is not my friend, she was my wife. It struck Morgan as interesting how precisely the man shifted her into the past tense. In Jane Austen, marriage is forever. I asked Rufalo to have you come ahead, said Harrington D’Arcy. Your backup will be here on the next ferry.

If properly attired, said Morgan.

Quite, said Mr. D’Arcy, failing to see the humour.

You asked for me, personally? Morgan wondered if the term ‘backup,’ was meant to be manipulative. The man was a lawyer. He wondered why his backup would take the club ferry, not the police launch?

You have a sound reputation.

No, that would be my partner. I simply have a reputation. And why do I not know you, Mr. D’Arcy, if you are so well connected?

Because I am successful enough to afford the luxury of remaining anonymous. I do not need to be known.

Corporate law, hostile takeovers?

Indeed. Venture capital. Acquisitions. We try to keep the hostility minimal.

Would you care to explain what happened?

I would if I could. That is why I requested you, because I cannot. And I do realize how compromising this all might appear.

"By all, you mean the death of your wife?"

And the facts, Detective Morgan. There are no witnesses to her death, I have no alibi, I do have a motive — several, in fact. It was a September-December affair. She’s younger than I am, but not as young as she looks. We were tiresomely unhappy. She was promiscuous, I am bisexual, when I bother at all. Quite unsuited. She was generally well liked, very kind to the less fortunate and a generous patron of the arts — and I am regarded as ruthless. By my friends in the profession. My enemies are not so charitable.

Did you?

Kill her? Good Lord, no. I don’t even know how she died. I woke up at dawn, came up for a morning’s pee over the side, it is always quite satisfying to piss publicly in such an august place as the Royal Toronto. And there she was. I slept on board alone through the night. God knows where she came from. I called in to your superintendent immediately, of course.

Did you touch her?

Well, yes, obviously. I thought she was sleeping off a binge, I shook her damned hard and I dressed her. Apart from that, no I did not touch her.

But you dressed her? Morgan asked, looking at the string bikini and noting that the top, such as it was, was green and the bottom was tropical blue. She was naked when you found her?

No, of course not. She had on her bottom piece, but her top was absent.

You heard nothing. It must have been light when she was — Morgan paused. He could see no harm in allowing D’Arcy’s story veracity, for the time being, — when she was brought on board. You heard nothing?

No mystery there. I sleep with ear plugs.

Morgan gazed at the man. Yes, perhaps, he thought. But when he had first stepped onto the boat it rolled under his weight and halyards rattled against the mast. You’d have thought someone carrying a corpse would waken a sleeper below. You would have thought a distraught husband wouldn’t have the detachment to shave. Mr. D’Arcy, aboard the Pemberly in the lee of the stately RTYC mansion, seemed quite in control and very well groomed.

* * *

Miranda looked around for the handsome Englishman when she disembarked at São Paulo and was ushered to the business-class lounge with a crush of other transients. Perhaps he had remained sitting and she had missed him in the bustle of baggage retrieval from overhead bins and the thronging masses moving up from steerage. She settled in with a gourmet breakfast of croissants, Swiss cheese, and prosciutto on a linen napkin and picked up her Heyerdahl book.

It had occurred to her that the Englishman might be going to Easter Island, as well. She was restless. She put the book back in her travel bag and pulled out the comics Morgan had given her. Scrooge McDuck from January 1988 was on top. She opened to the panels on the first page and was immediately engrossed, the way she used to be as a child reading Archie, with the voices inside her head.

The storyline was predictably silly, but there were a few brief passages referring sympathetically to the tragic past of the Rapanui people and there was a jarring reference to the brief visit of Captain Cook in 1774. It was like the cartoonists were using an elaborate code to deliver intimations of another story, not about ducks and their dog-faced adversaries, but about actual people in an actual place.

She turned to Batman, September 2003. Far from Gotham, the Caped Crusader was locked fist and fang with nefarious nasties among the moai when, suddenly and arbitrarily, there was an historical reference to the terrible plight of the Rapanui following their island’s fate at the farthest edge of Empire. The drawings in Batman, while bleak and sinister, detailed an array of hillside statues similar to their cheerfully pastel representation in Uncle Scrooge’s realm. The genre was different, the artwork was different, the setting in Batman was grim and austere while in Scrooge McDuck it was opulently tropical, and yet the moai gazing with sightless eyes from the volcanic quarry on the side of Rano Raraku were uncannily alike.

Miranda thumbed through the April 1954 issue of Wonder Woman — it was a prize, a decade older than she was. She then skimmed the April 1982 issue of The Mighty Thor and several other comics Morgan had tracked down for her during his exploratory forays on eBay. Each one delivered, in the midst of mayhem and fantasy, a brief homily about the horrors of a remote Eden corrupted by outsiders, all subversively inviting the reader to identify with the people of the moai rather than with the degenerate interlopers from the reader’s own world.

She recognized the Rano Raraku site in its various colourfully hued manifestations from photographs in Hyerdahl and other books, the same sources undoubtedly used by the comic-book artists. She had taken the trouble to memorize a few of the key names on the island. She knew the solitary town was called Hanga Roa and that the only beach, which was eight miles away on the other side, was called Anakena. She knew that the people of Rapa Nui speak Rapanui, and that moai rest upright on stone platforms called ahu, or at least that was their intended destination and the place where they received eyes carved from pale coral with red stone pupils, and where many, but not all, were given top hats of the same red scoria.

Deciding a cartoonist conspiracy to undermine established American values was in her own mind, Miranda pulled out Aku-Aku and began to read, but it seemed tiresomely indulgent, a kind of comic-book anthropology. Setting the book down on the glass table beside her, it bumped against her coffee cup and, in an attempt to avert catastrophe, she wrenched the book back and it tumbled onto the floor.

As she bent to retrieve the splayed book, Miranda noticed the scrawl in the margin beside a page of photographs. The Englishman! He must have exchanged books. How? While she was asleep. Why? She was wary. Why would he do that? She examined the book more closely. He had. And then he had disappeared.

She opened the book to the flyleaf and was surprised to find an autograph that was difficult to decipher, but might have been the author’s signature. There was no accompanying message or salutation, but low on the same page was a curiously enigmatic equation written in a clear script: 4/5 = 00. Four over five equals zero-zero. Linked zeroes equal infinity. Nothing more.

She thumbed through the pages, knowing intuitively that there would be a further revelation among them, but not expecting something so obvious as the neatly folded note she found near the back. She opened the note slowly and held it to the light to decipher penmanship that was sufficiently elegant to appear incongruous in ballpoint.

The missive started casually enough: I regret we did not have the opportunity to pursue our conversation about Mr. Heyerdahl’s island. It quickly shifted in tone: You are with the police, I am quite sure of that. We are kindred, Miss Quin. (Your name is on your hand luggage, Miranda Quin). The tone shifted again, from invasive to casually plaintive: I seem to be in a spot of trouble. Perhaps as a fellow in the constabulary, you could help me out. Would you mind terribly if we leave the plane together? They will not risk making a fuss if there are two of us. Thank you. T.E.

She read the note through again, carefully, trying not to be distracted by his precise and flowing hand. His message seemed almost nonchalant, yet it candidly implied distress. He was a cop, then, or a government agent. "A fellow in the constabulary." How charmingly pretentious, she thought. She looked around the lounge, but of course he was nowhere to be seen. If he was not flying through, there would have been no reason to remain at the airport. If he did not get off the plane … well, he must have, dead or alive. She shuddered, and for a moment was ashamed because she had thought what a pity, if such an attractive man was now dead.

At the service desk she had trouble making herself understood. The young woman spoke fluent school-English, but seemed to find Miranda’s request for a passenger manifest of the flight she had come in on to be an inordinately complex one. Finally, politely, she declared she could be of no help in Miranda’s quest for the handsome stranger.

Miranda sat down again, feeling oddly vulnerable.

In spite of his note, the man was little more than a face in the crowd. They had exchanged a few words, then he had passed on, leaving only a hazy feeling of erotic regret for a connection unmade, an opportunity missed. There was nothing she could do. She was a detective sergeant in homicide with the Toronto Police Service, a former RCMP officer, and far outside her jurisdiction. She tucked the note back among the pages of Aku-Aku, found some old copies of People magazine, and tried to read the captions.

She looked up occasionally and surveyed the bland, good quality furnishings in the business-class lounge and she felt a brief surge of claustrophobia, as if the walls had closed in while the world outside had fallen away. Miranda was not a world traveller. She had flown south to the Cayman Islands to scuba dive, had been around Canada and the States a few times as a Mountie during her training period in Saskatchewan and then with the prime minister’s office, where her police function had been to appear in scarlet uniform for photo ops. She had felt like a stuffed moose and left the force after three years for Toronto. This probably meant missing theopportunity for advancement to become a static Canadian icon on international missions.

After an interminable wait through undifferentiated minutes and hours, she boarded her plane for Chile and landed at dusk in Santiago, only a little apprehensive that she was in the country notorious for its thousands of disparu. She had to wait overnight for her flight to Rapa Nui — she was trying hard to think of her destination by the Polynesian name, not as Easter Island or Isla de Pasqua.

She settled back in the taxi driving in from the airport as they passed by a parade of decrepit buildings covered with graffiti and scruffy tropical vegetation. South America had always seemed unreal; it was only now, away from airports, that it was coming alive. She felt dread and a strange elation, driving into the centre of a city haunted with ghosts of political dissidents, but also with the ghosts of Incan emperors and the righteous conquistadors who destroyed them. She gazed out the window of the taxi at the people milling about in

Reviews for Reluctant Dead

[sjusyp · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is quite the complex story, and I marvelled at the way the author assembled a number of different threads and concepts into the fabric of a fantastic drama. I had mixed feelings about the end result, even though the technique was dazzling. One of my difficulties was with the two main characters, a male and a female detective, whom I found to be a bit less than credible. Quibbles aside, this book will appeal to many who love a detective story that requires a great deal of the reader.